If you are interested in web development you may have heard the term Progressive Web Apps. If you are not sure what the hype is all about or you know some things but want to get an easy transition into how to use some them, then I recommend you the InfoQ.com presentation called Up and Running with Progressive Web Apps. You will learn how the install, push notifications and offline functionality looks like and works.

Maybe you have experienced something like that too. You have a network attached storage and you connect it (for example via nfs) to your kodi system running on another machine (e.g. on a raspberry pi). You change something in your network configuration and – bam – nothing works. This could happen, because kodi gets it media data via a network address composed of IP addresses instead of a host name. If this happens to you – and it happened to me several times – this sucks. The first times I just created a new media source with the new IP address and imported all the media again. But wouldn’t i be nicer to just migrate the existing entries in kodi to their new location? This can be done relatively easy.

First: Use the /etc/hosts to define a hostname for the ip address of your NAS. Why? Because if there are new changes in your network configuration, you only need one change and everything is working again. Hint: If you are using librelec (like me), you need to set the hosts configuration in /storage/.config/hosts.conf .

Second: This doesn’t help you in the first place, if all your media entries are still linked to the old location. But there is a solution too: Kodi uses sqllite databases to manage its state. So you can use a sqllitebrowser like http://sqlitebrowser.org/ to change the wrong location of the media entries. Just follow the howto on the kodi wiki!

If you are developing for the web you certainly were confronted by the question if a given web feature (webrtc, URLSearchParams, …) is supported by browsers and which versions of them. To answer this question you can use the website https://caniuse.com.

If you want to check if a given port is open on a given remote server, you can use telnet. More and more telnet disappears on server. So the question arises: What can we use instead of telnet? Short answer: netcat. For example:

Installation

I installed Linux Mint 18.1. The only non standard thing i had to do, was to shrink the Windows 10 partition with gnuparted. The installer had no option for that or I did not found it. Other than that, the installation went without a hitch and I was able to start both Windows 10 and Linux mint afterwards.

The kernel which is installed is linux-image-4.4.0-72-generic.

Configuration

As the display of the notebook has 2560×1440 pixel, the user interface was very small and difficult to use with both the mate and cinnamon flavor. Cinnamon has a configuration (Settings-General) where you can scale the interface for high dpi displays as that one. With the option “double” the cinnamon user interface is quite nice and usable.

Sound works out of the box

Special keys like dimming the display or muting work

Problems

Wifi

As of now, the wifi is not working. There seems to be drivers missing. Output of lshw

If you are interested in open source and privacy friendly android apps you should have a look at this two projects.

The group Privacy Friendly Apps are a collection of Android-Applications, which are optimized based on privacy. This means that only a minimum of permissions is used. There are no unnecessary permissions, e.g. a torch application would ask for a permission to read the contacts.